The ninth season of the show is set four years after the eighth, with Jack still in exile, and this time, he and Chloe are "pitted against each other," Sutherland says.

Jack remains on the run, "not quite Osama bin Laden but a fugitive of high order," says producer Manny Coto. "When he resurfaces, we will learn he has a mission, whether it's good or bad we don't know, but they're hunting him." He reconnects with Chloe, who has "turned against the government; (she's) more a radical Snowden-type character," he says. With another hot-button issue — drone strikes — factored in, events will "launch the series into what will be a large tableaux set in London for some crazy events."

Executive producer Howard Gordon says the setting in London, where the show will begin filming later this month, was critical in highlighting the exiled state of its hero. "We found a place emotionally to locate Jack, physically to locate jack, and Chloe — who is not his trusty sidekick — someone who is damaged, has joined the free-information movement."
Rajskub says she "never thought 24 would come back and I never thought it would come back in this format. I just gotten away from (people) yelling out 'Chloe!' and I'm ready for it to start back up again."

Writing 24-episode seasons was "a marathon, it was really, really punishing," Gordon says. The new 12-episode plan is liberating. But the format remains the same: Though the season will still take place in real time over the course of a single day, but fewer episodes will allow writers to sometimes jump forward a couple of hours between them.

Producers say, only half-jokingly, that they sometimes need Wikipedia to remember what they've written. When they thought of reviving Devane's character and making him president, "we all thought he was dead," Coto says. (That would be Gregory Itzin's President Logan.)

Whither the long-discussed 24 movie? Though a script has been written, it never received a greenlight. "If this ends up rebooting the show or causing a film to be made, so be it," Sutherland says. But "right now we're focused on these episodes."